I'll be tag-teaming with L X Beckett at Bakka Phoenix bookstore Thursday, Oct. 24.  We'll both be reading from and signing our new novels, which have some really interesting similarities.

Beckett's Gamechanger is set about sixty years later than Stealing Worlds, but they could almost be the same world. In my novel, we're balanced on the uneasy edge of the future; AI, self-driving cars, and murderbots aren't quite here yet, but people are already being displaced by their imminent arrival.  In Gamechanger, the whole whirlwind of change that cyberpunk shows us has come and--not exactly gone, but evolved in really cool ways.  Beckett's vision of the future is staggering, and I'm thrilled to be able to share the evening.

If you're in the Toronto area in November, make sure you come down to Pravda to help us launch License Expired, the unauthorized James Bond anthology.  This is going to be huge fun, with readings, grandiose speeches and yes, vodka.

There came a dark December when David Nickle and I got fed up with jolly Santa and all the false cheer of this God of Consumerism, and decided to do something about it.  (Actually, it was summer and we were on writer's retreat in the country, but this version plays better, don't you think?)  The result was a short story, The Toy Mill, that subsequently won Canada's 1993 Aurora Award for best short spec-fic story of the year.  

A few years later we resurrected cold dead Claus in a short novel, which we wrote together over a weekend for the 3 Day Novel Contest.  The result was The Claus Effect which, while it didn't win the contest, was published by Tesseract Books in 1997.  

Fueled by a diet of chocolate-covered coffee beans, lack of sleep and an unremitting mix-tape loop of nauseatingly peppy Christmas jingles, The Claus Effect emerged from our first-generation laptops as a hallucinatory ode to the fall of Soviet Russia, the depradations of consumerism, to all the world's lost children and lost dreams, and the bizarre, terrifying figure at the center of this cyclone--his red greatcoat flapping, his beard whipped by glacial cold:  our fever-dream of timeless, pitiless, relentless Claus.

You can buy The Claus Effect in ebook form now thanks to ChiZine Publications.

Neal Stephenson's inspired vision to inspire a new generation to enter the sciences and engineering, the Hieroglyph Project, has launched its self-titled anthology.  We held a book launch here in Toronto on Sept. 13, which was well attended, and will be doing more events over the next month, all across North America.  

Here's what people are saying about Hieroglyph so far:

Symmetry Magazine

MIT Technology Magazine

Goodreads (average rating of 4.6 out of 5 so far)

Slate (story excerpt)

io9 (Madeline Ashby's story excerpted)

There's going to be a lot more; this is just a sample.  Meanwhile, we're doing launch events across the country.  I'll be attending two more, myself:  on October 2, I'll be in Washington, and we'll be discussing Hieroglyph at the World Bank Narrative Hackathon in Phoenix, AZ October 21-25th.  Hope you can make one of those!

(My story in the anthology is "Degrees of Freedom," which is about a separatist Haida nation in the Pacific Northwest that uses new technologies of governance to render the current national and provincial governments in the region obsolete.)

Run on over to Blind Ferret and you can pick up the print edition of Sun of Suns, Vol. 1.  This volume collects the first episodes of the story.  You'll meet all the main characters here:  Hayden Griffin, our sullen hero; Lady Venera Fanning, mad princess and spymaster; Martor the ship's go-fer, and even the pirate Dentius and his men.  

The script for this excellent adaptation is by Jeff Moss, the ink's by Guy Allen, and color by Michael Birkhofer.  

This was an amazing project and I had great fun working with such talented artists to bring my visions of Virga to life.  I hope you enjoy the result.

Back in 2005, the Directorate of Land Strategic Concepts of National Defense Canada (that is to say, the army) hired me to write a short novel, which they named Crisis in Zefra, about future peacekeeping and the evolution of the military in the 21st century.  Zefra did very well; you can learn more about it elsewhere on my site.  In 2010, they commissioned a second project.

Crisis in Urlia is now published. You can read it online for free or download the PDF.  Where Zefra concentrated on military evolution on the squad level, Urlia is about command-and-control, and includes a vision of a crowdsourced military that some might find downright shocking, as well as side forays into online nations and religions, post-agricultural food supplies, and 3d printed buildings. 

These works view the future through a particular lens (that of the military) but include as broad (practically epic, in fact) synopsis as I could craft of all the changes facing humanity and our environment over the next thirty years or so.  In terms of the rigour that went into them, they're probably my best science fiction.